The Philadelphia Jewish community is blessed with enough resources to make Jewish day school education attainable for all who want it, regardless of geography, denomination or financial means. We must strive to do so. Jewish day school does more than train rabbis and yeshiva bochurs; it grows future leaders in business, medicine, science and law who embody our traditions and...

Second Term for Obama Would Be Grave Mistake Regarding Rafael Medoff’s Op‐Ed piece in the Sept. 27 issue, “A Question With Resonance: ‘Do You Want to Start a Holy Jihad?’ ”: Do Jews around the world want to rely on the mercy of an unsympathetic American president? I am troubled by President Barack Obama’s rhetoric that he “has Israel’s back.”...

Sen. Arlen Specter was a fighter. If anyone doubted it through­out his long and feisty career, the evidence was clear to the very end: Faced with the grim news that cancer had infiltrated once again this summer, he hung on for nearly two more months. He lost his battle over the weekend, but his legacy lives on. His determined —...

There is much discussion currently about imposing limits on blasphemy. It seems clear that the vast majority of those in the West oppose it and many in Muslim-majority countries support it. I would argue that Judaism has not only tolerated blasphemy, but found a place for it in its sacred texts. This does not mean that communities have always handled...

For many years, I’ve heard from my Jewish friends and colleagues that Judaism just isn’t the spiritual practice they seem to be longing for — that they practice the religion because it’s part of their tradition, or because they don’t want to be responsible for “ending the line,” but that, in reality, being Jewish just doesn’t seem to offer much...